Hunter Killer

“Gaston, come out here!” called George Pires. “I’ll show you our ship!”

Savary stepped out into the rain and accepted the binoculars handed to him. He stared out down the channel and saw the Perle sweeping through the water, a light bow wave breaking over her foredeck, the three figures in uniform, up on the bridge, looking ahead.

The three men stood in the rain for another fifteen minutes, watching the submarine drift wide out to her starboard side, staying in 100-feet water, as she skirted around the Saint-Pierre Bank, a rise in the ocean floor that shelved up to only twenty-five feet in two places.

Almost directly south of the harbor entrance she made her turn, hard to port into the channel, and headed in. Her jet black hull seemed much bigger now, and more sinister. She was, in fact, the most modern of the Rubis Amethyste class, commissioned back in 1993. But Naval warships do not get old, they have everything replaced. And now the Perle not only packed the normal hefty punch of her Aerospatiale Exocet missiles, which could be launched from her torpedo tubes, she also carried a new weapon — medium-range cruise missiles. These could be launched from underwater, using satellite guidance, and could literally thunder into a target several hundred miles away, traveling at Mach 0.9, just short of the speed of sound.

She looked a symbol of menace. And according to the rare communications she made with her base, while crossing the Bay of Biscay for home, she had performed perfectly. And above all, quietly.

The Toulon-based engineers at the Escadrille des Sous-Marins Nucleaires d’Attaque (ESNA) had done their precision work superbly.

“That looks like a dangerous piece of equipment,” said Gaston Savary, as the sub came sliding past the jetty without a sound.

“That is a very dangerous piece of equipment,” replied Admiral Pires as he turned seaward to return the formal salute of Capt. Alain Roudy, high on the bridge.

CHAPTER FOUR

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2100

OFFICIAL RESIDENCE

FLAG OFFICER SUBMARINES

ATLANTIC HQ, BREST

There were five men, each of them sworn to secrecy, each of them in uniform, standing around the wrong end of Adm. Marc Romanet’s long dining room table. The other end contained five place settings and two bottles of white Burgundy from the Meursault region.

But this was officially pre-dinner. And down there at the business end was spread a whole series of naval charts and photographs being studied carefully by the two Admirals, Romanet and Pires, plus Capt. Alain Roudy and Cdr. Louis Dreyfus, commanding officer of the Amethyste, the Perle’s sister ship.

These were the two submarines selected by the French Navy to cripple the economy of Saudi Arabia, and half the free world. Or, stated another way, to free up the wealth beneath the Saudi Arabian desert for the overall benefit of the Saudi nation. Or, alternatively, to return the Saudi government to the ways of Allah and to the purity of the Prophet’s words. It all depended upon your point of view.

The fifth member of the group, Gaston Savary, was standing behind the Naval officers, sipping a glass of Burgundy and listening extremely carefully. He would be in front of the French Foreign Minister, Pierre St. Martin, in Paris the following afternoon, for a debriefing. The decision of the four men with whom he was dining tonight would determine, finally, whether this mission was Go or Abort.

The issue being discussed was the Red Sea, the 1,500-mile stretch of ocean that was Saudi Arabia’s western border. The Suez Canal formed the northern entrance, and the French submarines would, by necessity, make this transit on the surface.

They would travel separately, probably two weeks apart. Only the Amethyste would remain in this deep but almost landlocked ocean to carry out its tasks. The Perle would continue on and exit the Red Sea at the southern end, before proceeding up the Arabian Gulf and into the Strait of Hormuz, en route to its ops area, north of Bahrain.

The point was, could Captain Roudy make the southern exit underwater out of the range of prying satellites and American radar? Or would he need to come to periscope depth in order to move swiftly through the myriad islands that littered the ancient desert seaway before making his run out through the narrows and into the Gulf of Aden?

With the sandy wastes of Yemen to port, the Perle would pass to starboard the long coastline of Sudan, then the equally long shores of Eritrea, then Djibouti, before making the deepwater freedom of the Gulf of Aden. But the final 300 miles, past the Farasan Bank and Islands, follows a route where the water shelves up steeply on the Yemeni side, from 3,000 feet sometimes to 20 feet, which is precisely its depth off Kamaran Island.

The exit from the Red Sea is a long trench, narrowing all the way, with the island of Jabal Zubayr stuck right in the middle. Then there’s Jabal Zuqar Island, and Abu Ali Island, both with bright flashing warning lights, which are totally useless to a submarine trying to crawl along the sandy depths of the 600-foot-deep channel. The rise of Hanish al Kubra is a navigator’s nightmare, almost dead center in the channel, which is now only 300 feet deep and only about a mile wide.

However, there are two navigational channels there. One, with routes north and south, runs to the east of Jabal Zuqar, close to Yemen. It is shaped in the dogleg of the island’s west coast. The other marked channel runs twenty-five miles to the southeast and skirts the western side of Hanish al Kubra. Essentially, it comprises two narrow seaways, north — south and fourteen miles apart, running alongside a series of rocks, sandbanks, and shoals. These are the trickiest parts because of the narrow channels, which skirt a couple of damned great sandbanks, one of them only sixty-five feet from the surface. However, this stretch, which does need the greatest navigational care, is the final black spot for the submariner.

Thereafter, both south routes converge into a forty-five-mile-long marked seaway, which suddenly shelves up again, to less than 150 feet, but has the advantage of being dead straight all the way to the southern strait, gently falling away again, to a depth of 600 feet.

In places it narrows to a few hundred yards, with a very shallow shoal to port, but it runs on into the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and then into the Gulf, into depths of 1,000 feet plus, right off Djibouti — and the U.S. base west of the Tadjoura Trough.

“Think you can handle that, Captain Roudy?” asked Admiral Romanet.

“Yessir. If those chart depths are accurate, we’ll get through without being seen. Under seven knots in the shallow areas, but we’ll be all right.”

“The charts are accurate,” said Admiral Romanet. “We sent a merchant ship through there a month ago using sounders all the way. We checked depth against chart depth from Suez to Bab el Mandeb. The charts are correct.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Captain Roudy. “Then the GPS will see us through the southern end. I’ll run with the mast up.”

“Very well,” replied Marc Romanet, who was well aware of the tiny GPS system, positioned at the top of the periscope of the refitted Rubis. It was not much bigger than a regular handheld unit, and it would stick out of the water a matter of mere inches. The Perle’s CO had plenty of depth for that. And that minuscule system, splashing through the warm, usually calm waters of the Red Sea, would always put Alain Roudy within thirty feet of where he wanted to be.

“Before we dine I would like to go over the plan for the Amethyste, which will be following you through the Suez Canal almost three weeks later,” said the Admiral. “Commander Dreyfus, you will, of course, run straight down the Gulf of Suez along the Sinai Peninsula and into the Red Sea at the Strait of Gubal. Have you done it before?”